Coyne: Robocon is a scandal with no clear pattern

Pierre LaChappelle is the owner of Pierre's Poutine in downtown Guelph, Ont. "Pierre Poutine" is the fictious name at the heart of the robocalls controversy.

Photograph by: Adam Gagnon
, For Postmedia News

A week after the story of the fraudulent robocalls first broke — or rather re-broke, the rudiments of the story having been reported at the time of the last election — the scandal remains a puzzle.

On the one hand, the allegations are too widespread, the technical capacity required too great, for this to be a simple matter of human error, or a few overzealous volunteers, even allowing for the probability that many of the reports of fraudulent calls are themselves bogus. For example, Aaron Wherry of Maclean's magazine has compiled a list of 21 ridings in which voters were given false information on poll locations, in suspicious circumstances. In some cases the calls purported to come from Elections Canada, in others from one party or another, but falsely in either event.

In dozens of other ridings there have been reports of people supposedly calling on behalf of, say, the Liberals doing everything they can to discredit them: calling at odd hours, or on holy days, or otherwise going out of their way to annoy their recipients. As with the phoney poll locations, the vast majority of these calls have been reported by the opposition parties. Though that is not necessarily proof that anyone in the Conservative party was behind them — the self-interest of the other parties is clear — there is enough evidence to demand further investigation.

On the other hand, the calls would seem too random, the risks too great relative to any possible reward, to suggest the involvement of anyone higher up. In most of the ridings where the Conservatives have been accused of making fraudulent calls, the Conservative candidate won going away. Only in a handful of such ridings was the result even close, and even there any such clandestine operation would have had to have been wildly successful to have turned the hundreds or even thousands of votes needed to change defeat into victory. Moreover, in many other ridings that were very close, there have been no reports of such activity.

That doesn't make any of this right, of course, but it does make it a puzzle. There just doesn't seem any sense of strategic direction to the calls. And why would any party take such a risk — not only of discrediting the party, but of jail time for those involved — for such a meagre reward? Even if you accept the NDP MP Pat Martin's theory, that the intent was not to win ridings but to reduce the other parties' votes, and thus deprive them of funds under the per vote subsidy, the game does not seem worth the candle. (The subsidy is on the way out anyway.) How on earth would anyone even think they could get away with such a scheme?

Except . . . they are getting away with it — whoever they are. Here we are nine months after the fact, and Elections Canada appears still to be in the early stages of investigating the whole affair. The RCMP have been called in, but seem to have confined their efforts to the riding of Guelph, where most attention has focused. Certainly we can have no confidence in Parliament to get to the bottom of this. Several days of question period have been worse than useless in this regard, while the chance of any parliamentary committee looking into it is remote, so long as the Conservatives hold a majority. For that matter, the opposition parties themselves have been notably slow to report or even collect evidence of the fraud, though they were supposedly among its victims, while the media, after those first contemporaneous reports, seemed to lose interest, until Postmedia's story last week, detailing a possible Conservative connection to the Guelph calls, woke everybody up.

This is dispiriting. You needn't be convinced of the Conservatives' involvement to harbour some serious concerns, and with reason: as I've said before, the presumption of innocence does not require us to be deaf, blind and stupid. Yet the institutions we trust to hold government to account in this country are so weak — well, do we trust them any more? I'm not convinced that there are such systemic issues raised here as to warrant a public inquiry, and I'm not sure anyone has really made that case. Rather, it seems that people have so lost confidence in these other institutions that a public inquiry becomes almost their fallback response.

What everyone needs to do first is go back to square one, to ground zero in this affair: the riding of Guelph. From recent reporting, we now have two crucial pieces of intelligence. One, that the calls giving out false information on where to vote came from a cash-prepaid cellphone registered to a bogus name ("Pierre Poutine"). That tells us the caller knew he was doing wrong — that the deception was deliberate. And two, that the Conservative campaign in Guelph was a client of the same automated calling outfit, RackNine Inc., that the infamous Mr. Poutine used, having called it more than 30 times during the campaign — and, what is more, didn't report it on its expenses. Without casting aspersions on anyone else, that strongly suggests the anonymous crank caller had some ties to the party.

Presumably he did not pay RackNine out of his own pocket. So the question then becomes: who paid his expenses? And, broadening out, who footed the bill for similar operations, live or automated, in other ridings? As in any such investigation, "follow the money" and you cannot go far wrong.

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